Abstract

Based on an existing model for calcium homeostatis (dynamics) and taking the help of feedback linearization philosophy of nonlinear control theory, two control design (medication) strategies are presented for automatic treatment of parturient paresis (milk fever) disease of cows. An important advantage of the new approach is that it results in a simple and straightforward method and eliminates the necessity of a significantly more complex neural network based nonlinear optimal control technique, as proposed by the author earlier. As an added advantage, unlike the neural network technique, the new approach leads to ‘closed form solution’ for the nonlinear controller. Moreover, global asymptotic stability of the closed loop system is always guaranteed. Besides theoretical justifications, the resulting controllers (medication strategies) are validated from numerical simulation studies of the nonlinear system as well. Moreover, from a numerical study about the robustness of the algorithms with respect to parametric uncertainty, it was observed that the optimal control formulation is a better option over the dynamic inversion formulation.